A few generations ago, another American president took office when our country was mired in another devastating financial disaster. Of course, I’m talking about Franklin Roosevelt, a president to whom Obama is occasionally compared (after JFK and Lincoln, I suppose). And following tradition, he addressed the nation announcing his vision for America. It was a bit of pep talk really. And although few who actually heard that rousing speech are still around today, we’ve all heard (or read) the declaration he delivered in this opening remarks:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Always presented to me as the key phrase of a historic speech, those words themselves never rattled with great wisdom for me. It always seemed a little redundant, and too straightforward to offer much in the way of revelation. But then again I didn’t grow up during the Great Depression.

Now we’re living though the worst economic crisis since that time, and while our circumstances aren’t nearly as dire as the day Roosevelt moved into the White House, no one knows how much worse things may get. Or where we are headed as a nation. And as luck would have it, we seem to have brought in a decent and thoughtful man to help steer our country out of this new financial morass of our times. It seemed almost hopeful.

And then the fact that he happened to spend some formative years overseas in a Muslim country seemed fortuitous as well, following on the heels of an administration that incited so much hatred and animosity from Muslims around the world. Yet, for all the logic or serendipity that seemed inherent in the rise to power of Barack Obama, others see something else.

There is a bizarre streak of American humanity which is utterly convinced that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. And once you’re willing to chain your brain up to that premise, it’s an easy leap in logic to assume that this astute mulatto man must be an an evil foreign agent assigned to destroy our country. And there’s more. A lot of these less than enlightened Americans also are certain that Obama is a communist, the leader of the evil “new world order,” the devil or the Anti-Christ (are they the same thing? I’m still not sure), a fascist dictator, and perhaps gay or a Muslim, or worse– the most liberal politician alive. And they are scared. They are angry. And what should worry ALL of us, is that they seem to be beyond the reach of all logic or common sense.

And now I get it. FDR was right. As a country in crisis at a critical point in our history, the greatest thing we have to fear IS fear itself. And I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to really fear the fear. And I think the paragraph that surrounded his heralded declaration back in 1932 is even more illustrative of our current dilemma:

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”

And this is EXACTLY what’s going on– now, in these critical days. In the face of across the board loses at the polls, the Republican party and their media agents have chosen to unleash an unheralded fear and smear campaign to brutalize the enemy (i.e., the actual elected government). Rush Limbaugh, the defacto (media) leader of the G.O.P., openly cheers for the failure of our government under Obama. And he’s just setting the tone for a massive ongoing effort– nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror is being instigated and encouraged via the many-headed hydra of the right-wing media machine. And it’s nonstop.

And it’s no secret around the world that Americans, in general, are some of the most ignorant people on the planet. Add to that, the anxiety that continues to grip our country since the September 11th attacks and the inconvenient collapse of our economic system, and there’s suddenly a buzzing and bristling bunch of screwed Americans who suddenly want to know what the hell is going on? (While they didn’t seem too concerned during eight years of mayhem and plunder under Bush.)

I suppose it’s only natural to look for BIG answers when you’ve got big problems. And two unrelated historical milestones (moving into a new millennium and electing a black president) seems to have driven some of the logic-deprived among us to apply grandiose meaning to current events and invoked lots of irrational suspicion regarding any proposed changes in governance or our economic system. The three horsemen of contemporary apocalyptic fear (religiosity, paranoia, and xenophobia) were already mounted and ready to ride before Obama’s election. And since that historic moment, a fourth has come forward. And I think he’s going to lead the charge. Perhaps you already know where this is going. (Let’s just say he used to wear a white sheet.)

Despite the fact that we miraculously elected a man with African heritage to our highest office, there’s a seething element of race hatred that’s still alive and well in this country that once enslaved people who looked like Barrack Obama. And although the dirty racist words and imagery are only used by the most extreme and extroverted of that crowd, for every one of them there’s hundreds more across the fruited plain who will never accept or respect that uppity brown man who gets on the television and has the nerve to act like he’s president.

And make no mistake about it, all this garbage about the invalidity of Obama’s birth certificate, and all the disenfranchised and hateful white people alleging Obama is something "other" and not like you and me— it’s all frosting and filagree on top of the word they dare not utter– nigger.

And whether or not the people who are behind all this incitement of hatred and fear mongering are actually racists themselves is beside the point. I mean, Karl Rove’s atheism never got in the way of manipulating fundamentalists to vote (and campaign) for Republicans. It’s not hard to see how it works. There’s no shortage of less-than informed Americans to run through manipulative focus group studies. Then with data in hard, you go forward with media weaponry you know will be effective– no matter how profane or irrational the entreaty might be. Lee Atwater was an expert at this kind of thing, and he didn’t seem to be an actual racist in his personal life. And when Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination began to founder, her operators started experimenting with the same kind of toolbox.

If you haven’t seen this clip online of Shepherd Smith of Fox News, you oughtta take a minute and ingest this artifact of contemporary culture. I don’t watch enough of Fox (mostly clips online…) to know much about the guy, but he seems to be emerging as some kind of reactionary conscience over there. (Like this outburst regarding our government’s involvement in torture, or his habit of making fun of his unbalanced Fox News cohort, Glenn Beck.)

But in this particular clip (from the day that white supremacist loonwent ballistic at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.), Smith noting he’s frightened by the torrent of twisted and psychotic email that’s been filling the Fox News servers since Obama’s election. Mr. Smith and his guest agree– the realms of the internet provide a powerful clubhouse for all sorts of angry and misinformed people to feed into each other’s insanity, loading up with “hate not based in fact”. Although Smith seems shocked to discover some Fox viewers are “out there in a scary place." I’m sure othersweren’t surprised at all.

And what he doesn’t say (and what he can’t say), is how much the network he works for is feeding these people tainted factoids and manipulative Republican propaganda. Even Charles Krauthammer came out this year to congratulate Fox News for creating an “alternate reality.” And he said that the relative consensus on current events we used to enjoy in our society was the result of a “liberal bias” in the media…which apparently existed for all time until Fox News came along to balance everything out. Which makes you wonder what a network like Fox News would have had to say during the great American labor struggles or the civil rights movement.

Of course his argument is bogus. But it doesn’t matter. There’s always Fox News, and NewsBusters, and the World Nut Daily out there to back him up. Once we had a marketplace of ideas where agendas and opinions and versions of events battled it out for the public’s allegiance, and at a certain point some semblance of common sense would win out, and as a nation we would decide that slavery was wrong, and women should vote, and minorities should have equal rights, and wars of choice like we had in Vietnam were immoral. Sure, not everybody agreed. But some form of consensus came to pass and differing sides moved on to other battles. But not anymore.

Today, the natural coalescence of public thought is easily thwarted the monied and manicured "alternate reality."While some semblance of consensus is battled out in (what is pejoratively called) the "mainstream media," a conservative flavored narrative flows freely beside it as a more simplistic consumer-friendly product.

And it’s not that corporate America or the Chamber of Commerce is necessarily invested in all that ignorant claptrap, but by putting that kind of manipulative language and cynically clever sophistry churned out by Karl Rove or Frank Luntz. And there’s not a lot of quality control on some of these mindless appeals to the lowest of the lowest common denominator. An example might be a headline I saw at the Drudge Report on a slow day in June– BEWARE THE OBAMA ‘EVIL EYE. Again, this was a headline on one of the most clicked pages on the web. Assorted photos of Obama’s "menacing glance were included with this short and shabby piece of original Drudge journalism (something you rarely see)." And while it’s easy to find almost any facial expression imaginable when you’re dealing with someone as photographed as a sitting President, but the shots Drudge put together merely showed Obama looking attentive or tired, or perhaps just appropriately sober. Take a look yourself. It’s ridiculous. And everybody knows, PresidentHairy-Eyeball went back to Texas months ago.

How did things get so ludicrous? You might wanna check out this confidential memo written by a corporate attorney named Lewis Powell (soon to be a Supreme Court Justice) back in 1971. It was a manifesto outlining how the business interests of America needed to get serious about shaping public opinion in their favor. It’s one of those little known documents that truly changed the world, and not in a good way.

And if you recall those days so long ago, they used to call the mechanisms of wealth and power in this country “the system.” And visionary people like Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader successfully took on “the system” and helped protect millions from the deadly consequences of amoral profiteering and unregulated capitalism. Well, Lewis Powell saw these people as the enemy. And through his writing and counter-activism he helped create a broad public relations front in media and academia to defend and protect the raw capitalist ambitions of the system itself. But even the late Mr. Powell (who is often recalled for his perfect manners and genteel nature) might be shocked at the divisive and brutish behavior of the swarms of ignorant and politically agitated Americans who have been home-schooled by a sensational and partisan united front of right-wing media he arguably fathered.

In a recent column, Frank Rich discussed Shep Smith’s scary inbox and how the new wave of anti-Obama rhetoric is increasingly paranoid and irrational across the board. While some white voters wouldn’t support someone like Obama in any situation, the fact that they see him as the cause and architect of all the frightening generational changes that are happening all at once. He’s the new boogie man– the embiodiment of a new century they’re not ready to understand.

In closing, Rich linked to this video featuring Jon Voight at a Republican fundraiser, where he called Obama a false prophet, and said the Republicans have to get back in power so they can “free this nation from this Obama oppression.” Which on the face of it seems like just so much mean-spirited red meat for the conservatives on hand, but in reality words like “false prophet” resonate profoundly in religio-paranoid circles. (And a lot of them have guns…) Plus– saying Obama is the cause of whatever “oppression” people might be feeling in the middle of a financial disaster that was coming on long before Obama came to power isn’t just disingenuous– it’s toxic. (And did you hear about his evil eye?)

And conversely, this column from a Fox website might be as good of an illustration as any of how much self-serving bullshit can be crammed into a short editorial. I don’t even know where I ran across this piece, which reads like a ten-year old’s attempt at a persuasive essay. The author of this gem is a guy named Noel Sheppard, who routinely churns out rightist grist for the unintentionally comical “NewsBusters” site (which often reads like a lampoon of a conservative news portal). But his point is this– if the electorate wasn’t scared off by all the guilt-by-association tactics used by douche bags like Sean Hannity (i.e., using Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright and Tony Rezko as scarecrows), then the press must have hypnotized us into electing Obama. How else could it have happened? I mean, McCain had so much more charisma…

Sheppard’s weak thesis somehow merited over four-thousand comments before they shut the floodgates. And if you have the stomach for it, you can go read a few. But I wouldn’t recommend it. I hate to think of all the time I’ve wasted looking at all the ignorance and vitriol on display in the comments addendum to online articles and opinion pieces. Especially if I happen to follow a link from the ultimate right-wing portal behind this new Age of Unreasoning– The Drudge Report.

Anyway, I could spend all day linking to all the spewing spigots of ignorance and intolerance on the web. But I won’t and I can’t. But I will say this, when we went and hooked ourselves all together with all these computers and cell phones and hand-held whatchamacallits there was a general feeling that being able to share so much “information” was going to make us smarter or wiser. But “information” is neutral, it’s just patterns of data. It can be good or bad or right or wrong. Or persuasive, if you have a particular mindset you wanna spread around.

And all we’ve done is make it possible to share “data” between ourselves like never before. We’re not creating more truth. And just as old “information” industries like newspapers, magazines and the film and music business see all this data sharing as a devastating profit killer so far, there’s no assurance that setting all this information free has made us any smarter either.

Like the flood waters after Katrina, some of the information that floods the American mind is a toxic soup. Awash in carefully targeted misinformation and logic-free passion screeds, there is a pandemic of fear and ignorance sweeping this country. And all this unjustified terror is poisoning American political discourse and is most certainly paralyzing “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Thanks to the craven manipulation by people who should know better, the new American ignoranti are marching backward– into our racist past, into a new McCarthyism, and eventually all the way back to that Christian apocalypse continually predicted since the first century. And when these folks fire up their PC in search of information, you can bet they’re not looking for verifiable facts, reasoned journalism, or opposing views. No no no. That’s stuff the devil uses to fool ya.

And it gets worse. Since Obama’s election there’s been a huge surge in sales of guns and ammunition in this country. Prices are up and ammo is getting scarce. People are stocking up. For what? Good question. Meanwhile, the Obama administration really hasn’t made any moves or statements indicating any coming new gun control regulations. However, there’s lots and lots and lots of “information” out there telling folks that “Obama is coming to take their guns.” So, are you scared yet?

After talking about so much trouble in our midst, there’s an urge to come to conclusions– to predict or to warn of some assassination or apocalypse. Or perhaps to offer some road to widespread common sense in all this madness. But I don’t have a good answer to plug into such an equation. When you have human beings as your adversary, there’s always the last resort call for decency, or that chance of some recognition by the losing side that their goals or motivations may have been flawed. The system fights dirty. And empathy that makes us human is our fatal disadvantage.

When the Supreme Court granted corporationsthe rights of human beings and equated the money they spend as free speech (with the same Lewis Powell writing the majority opinion)– it set loose the hellhounds of capitalism in this country, allowing amoral ambition and soulless motivations to run rampant in the marketplace. And then Ronald Reagan came along to make it all official. And the legacy of Powell and Reagan (and more contemporary operators like Grover Norquist) is a Republican media machine that works on behalf of the large corporate financial concerns. Period.

And the Democratic party? Some of them are better than others. I generally trust Robert Kennedy Jr, who believes that the constant influx of big business money has completely compromised our political process, and says: "the Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt." Sounds about right. It certainly helps to explain the inadequacies of the House and Senate under Pelosi and Reid. And while the nature of the Republicans is to stick to "the plan," the Democratic party is bigger, more varied, and unlike the Republicans they have to deal with the tough stuff– like consensus, ordinary constituents, and the most difficult of all– reality. The Republicans are in favor of God and lower taxes.

And if that sounds like a sinister plot, I suppose it is. And while you could make a case that this powerful triumvirate of transnational capitalists, the Republican party and assorted dark masters of media had a good ride, from the Gipper to the attack on Iraq. (Making Clinton’s Presidency about a sex scandal was even somewhat of a victory, and he was half-Republican anyway.) And now we’re left with a broken economy and two endless military occupations, and the Republican Party unpopular and out of power across the board. Yet, despite so many recent political losses their alternate reality media machine seems to be cranking even harder into the American psyche. It might seem counterintuitive, but winning isn’t everything. It’s all about not losing (money).

And I don’t think you can blame it all on Rupert Murdoch or Rush Limbaugh or any of those guys. And if you look at the movie "Network," Paddy Chayefsky was incredibly prescient in almost predicting what would become the Fox Network and Fox News (although Glenn Beck is far less appealing version of Howard Beale). But I don’t think the Ned Beatty character in that film really exists. My personal idea for this incredible conspiracy of fear and unreason is that there is no evil leader behind it all. I think we’re through the looking glass now and a simple mathematics created to serve the short-term profit margin of the entrenched financial status quo is in charge now. And the right wing noise machine is running on autopilot. The reason there’s no leadership on the right is because they don’t need it (or can’t have it). The politics, policy and all the Republican party products are generated by a big simple algorithm. And all their major candidates need to do is step up and put it on like a nice blue business suit. (Remember how McCain "transformed" during the last election?)

While they’re getting the white and right crowd energized by these tactics, they’re not winning over the rest of us. Big money had an eight year free reign over our government and economy, and it didn’t work out so well. They’ve spent their wad, and run out of ideas, leadership, and vision, and all seem to do right is make a mess, while the media machine does all the heaving lifting. All the links on the Drudge Report and everything that comes out of Sean Hannity’s mouth is the result of this crude media mathematics. And there is no real rumination behind the on-air musings of Bill O’Reilly or Michael Savage, and no innate desire to leave a legacy of a life dedicated to the greater good of mankind. No, it’s much simpler than that. When the other side is ahead in the polls, you operate like Limbaugh during the Democratic nomination process. You cause trouble. "Operation Chaos."

Perhaps by this point you’re wondering what does all this have to do with radio? Well, for as long as I remember, in between the sane programming coming in from around the world on shortwave there’s always been mad preachers and nutjobs from America exporting fear to the planet. And now that kind of diseased discourse has spread far beyond shortwave. Especially on the web. And Glenn Beck and his eyeballs have brought paranoid lunacy into the mainstream like never before. But shortwave has more charm. And you don’t have to look at their faces.

So for a week in June I went back to the source, scanning the back alleys of radio with my antique Zenith Trans-Oceanic. It’s an H500 from the early fifties, and it still works pretty good– at least on the band setting between four and eight megacycles. (We call ’em megahertz these days.) And more significantly it overcomes a bit of the RF noise of my Brooklyn digs. I guess it was my steampunk adventure of the summer– drinking hot tea and tuning in the apocalypse with a big gilded vacuum tube device.

It’s a fun radio to use, but it’s not so good for bandscanning. There’s no digital frequency readout (for logging and ID purposes). And the dial itself needs to be calibrated. And besides, I wasn’t DXing. For the first time, I was intentionally looking for as much stupid as I could find. Because of other obligations most of my roaming occurred after nine or ten at night. But I don’t think there was any time when I couldn’t find someone, somewhere saying something ridiculous. For this post I scooped up some of the more flavorful froth I found from the 60 and 49 meter bands. And I invite you to join me for some urgent and uneasy listening. You just might unlearn something.

In this clip, former judge Roy Moore is chatting on the phone with Rick Wiles of Trunews. Which is not just the “end times newscast,” but also the “only nightly newscast reporting the countdown to the second coming of Jesus Christ.” And Wiles says that Obama has been put in office for one purpose– “to start a civil war in this country,” just to give a flavor of the thoughtful rhetoric on this program.

Ever wonder if America just might be better off without all that “separation of church and state” business? And public school teachers reading the bible to our children, and religious police would enforce public morality? (like in… Saudi Arabia?) Then you might wanna head over to Alabama and get behind Roy Moore’s 2010 campaign for Governor.

Perhaps you recall when Moore was the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court a few years ago. Because there was a big stink when he refused to remove an ostentatious display of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. Not surprisingly, his stubborn religiosity cost him his high court gig, but it gained him a lot of brownie points with fundamentalists across the country, and served as the launching point for his new political career. And in his state he’s effectively established a splinter sect of religious conservatives who are working on taking over the Republican Party there.

At first, Wiles gets Moore lathered up with talk about Obama’s socialist agenda, but Moore quickly diverts the conversation into more religious territory– decrying Obama’s recognition of Gay Pride Month. Perhaps if Moore is elected he could counter this move by observing a month of gay shame in Alabama.

“It’s a travesty,” Moore says when Wiles tells him there was actually a “gay party” in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. While it doesn’t seem likely that all of our tax dollars that have gone toward death, torture and destruction would bother Moore all that much (he doesn’t like Muslims much anyway), the idea that American money has gone toward letting a few gay service people blow off steam is too much for him to bear.

“Only God can right these matters,” Moore says, seeming to stop himself from finishing where that thought might have been going. I’ll leave it to you to ponder how that might play out if Moore and his ilk could play out their theocratic fantasies in real life.

I suspect this broadcast originates from one of the two giant brokered shortwave monsters in Tennessee– WWRB or WWCR. It’s "Mark" and a female co-host I assume to be his wife. I guess you could call them radio missionaries working on behalf of the big sky guy– Yahweh. There doesn’t seem to be any production to the program itself. It’s just your basic phone call to the transmitter. Mark has a handful of notes and news stories to share, and when gets lost in his "documents" he hands the phone to the wife, letting her riff on the wornders of Yahweh until he has paperwork in order.

This clip starts out with Mark reading a letter from a concerned soldier from Kentucky regarding how the army is actively taking detailed inventory of all the personal firearms belonging to soldiers and officers on base. Hmmm. Could this have something to do with the internal Department of Homeland Security report on the threat of right-wing extremism that became public last April?

I don’t know about you, but I kind of like the idea of the government keeping better track of heavy-duty home weaponry these days. The recent murder of an arbortion doctor as well the bloody incident at the Holocaust Museum added more validity to the warnings of Janet Napolitano and the DHS report she presented on the dangers of the deep and dark entrenched right-wing element in America.

And Mark has more bad news. Apparently, the world elites (including Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and the Rockefellers) are meeting on yachts and planning to kill off most of the rest of the people in the world. And I gues this may happen quite soon. Before the rapture. Massive depopulation theories have been popular on shortwave since I can remember– almost as common as the world government-new world order paranoia. And I guess it all feeds into the same colorful narrative, as the last hurrah of the evil forces on Earth before the messiah comes down and takes the faithful up to heaven for a big shindig– while the rest of us spend eternity as human barbeque. Burn baby burn.

Next up, some rather animated fire and brimstone style conspiracy radio.

This guy’s worked up. And his sermon almost plays out like an exorcism, as he proclaims the names of all the evil he can think of– OLD Satan, and the anti-Christ of course– and THE BEAST, and then he goes down a list– the serpent, the old dragon, the devil, the son of perdition, Lucifer, the Destroyer, and more. Not only is the reception bad here, but he’s a loud and boisterous guy and it’s hard to understand all the prognosticating going on. But what he does do is move onto another important list. This time he proclaims the names of the embodiment of the “the beast” on earth. Specifically the one world government problem– the “one-worldism, the United Nations, the new world order, the Knights Templar, and the Priory of Sion (who apparently are even more powerful than the Illuminati), and all the sons of Cain. It sounds like the devil has quite a social calender.

He ends his rowdy lecture with a spirited sign-off worthy of a Latin American football announcer. All in all it’s a testosterone-soaked overview of most (if not all) of the paranoia conspiracies that have haunted the followers of Jesus for hundreds of years. And then when it all ends with a telephone disconnect and an automated recording (just like the Yahweh cultists radio show) it even seems a little stranger, that this big voice being broadcast on an international radio transmitter was just another guy yelling into a telephone.

And the fact that this program cuts off in the same sloppy manner as the Yahweh believers program tells me that they were probably broadcasting on WWRB as well. And it seems that this big international radio outlet doesn’t pay for an actual human board operator in the evening hours. From these recordings it appears their programming runs through some sloppy automation interface that doesn’t compensate for incoming programming on the telephone ending a few seconds early. I guess everybody’s cutting back these days.

Of course, if you listen to shortwave radio you’ve already heard all this heebie-jeebie hullabaloo before. All this rapture preparation and mark of the beast anxiety didn’t just hit the airwaves when Obama was elected. It’s a bizarre sickness in the very fabric of our culture. And while it infects so much discourse and entertainment all around us, only on shortwave you can hear (and almost smell) the mythical doom visions in their unrefined state. And while we didn’t invent crazy religious thought, the United States of America has been a breeding ground for it for a mighty long time. Much in the same way Australia later became a dumping ground for unwanted criminals for the British Empire, the new world was a dumping ground for all sorts of wild-eyed religious fanatics from Western Europe. And their legacy lives on.

A 2002 Time Magazine poll found that almost sixty-percent of Americans believe “the events in Revelation are going to come true.” And an AP poll in 2007 determined that one in four of us believed that Jesus was going to return to earth that very year. You get the idea. We is crazy. At least a lot of us are. And even among people who might not consider themselves overtly religious, there’s still plenty of superstition and irrationality to go around. After all, when it comes to apocalyptic sensationalism and pornographic arousal of the conspiracy gland, why should the religiously-ill have all the fun?

Here you have a couple of the most successful secular scaremongers in the world in a bizarre radio pow-wow. It’s one-time rivals Alex Jones and David Icke, rolling around in the mud of some middle-ground they’ve cleared between their divergent paranoid theories. These apocalyptic showmen mine the concepts of science fiction TV and movies instead of using the King James Version for narrative support. And a few years ago these two giant fear-purveyors realized that there were just too many more books and DVDs to sell if they could put their differences behind them and create some viable consumer crossover business by joint media appearances, like this one.

For those who don’t know the history of these two professional paranoids, let me offer a little background. David Icke (pronounced like “Ike,” not “icky.) was a BBC sports announcer and then a spokesmen for the UK Green Party when he realized he was “the son of god.” and from that time forward he’s taken himself quite seriously and has created a whole cottage industry based on his own magnificence and need to enlighten us all. While he seems to have abandoned all the son of god business, his claim to fame eventually came through exposing the evil cabal of shape-shifting reptile peoplewho rule our world (like the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger and Bob Hope). Alex Jones on the other hand, is a big loud Texas talk radio host who got his start on Austin cable access TV. I"ve written about Jones before (which you can read here), and hardly feel the need to promote a guy who’s one of the most ambitious self-promoters I’ve ever seen. When it comes to secular "new world order" conspiracy, Alex Jones is probably at the top of the heap these days. And at first he considered David Icke’s presence in the paranoia panorama as a big problem. His concern over letting blood guzzling reptilians into the conspiracy cannon led Jones to call Icke a conman and an opportunist, and his theories the "turd in the punch bowl” for all the seekers of hidden truths.

In an odd turnabout, in this clip Icke kicks into some rambling discussion about the inherent weakness of our “reptilian brain.” And he’s NOT talking about scaly skin blood suckers, but the brain stem and all that squishy stuff around it that makes up the vestigial remnants of our pre-mammalian legacy. In light of Icke’s long-standing fixation on reptilian villains, Jones steps in to let his listeners know–“this is not debatable. ” Icke is talking about real brain science this time, not scaly-skinned Republicans. And Icke responds with a quick hint of nervous laughter before carrying on with his neurological mumbo-jumbo. And so the ambitious Mr. Jones has kept the “turd” out of his punch bowl once again.

But here’s the funny thing. Protestant Armageddonists are even more bizarre. Instead of tending to their own souls, they seem more obsessed with the “sins” of other people– total strangers who don’t necessarily have the same religious beliefs. And many long for the day when America will become the theocratic state they believe it should have been all along. The dream of Roy Moore and his ilk is to indoctrinate our children in the public schools. And let’s face it, the only reason these people can keep riding that same sick pony around the American stage is because too many people let religiously infected people get a hold of their children at an early age. As their irrational belief beliefs are passed down generations it’s not just child abuse– it’s a viral infection that continues to stunt our spiritual growth as a nation.

However, the post-religious doom prophets don’t worry about everyone’s sins. They realize all that perverse religion turns a lot of people off. So, instead of putting a modern spin on ancient myths, they put an ancient spin on contemporary economics and politics. If you figure out we’re under the thumb of powerful people, they’ll tell you it all stems from bizarre rituals, or exotic bloodlines or visitors from outer space. Whether their conspiracy theories are more ridiculous than the burning bush or the impending return of Jesus doesn’t much matter. Dressing up the machinations of big money and the world power mafia in the garb of the Illuminati or jumbo lizard suits just turns your righteous anger into comic angst. Because you’ve invested into a load of crap.

If you’re willing to wade into the online swamps that surround showmen like Icke or Jones you can read how all these earnest believers create a burgeoning support group together to brace themselves against the coming cosmic doom they both predict. in their narratives, a seductive mix of fact and fantasy is always at play. Legitimate concerns about transnational corporations and governmental regimes twisting the truth, stealing our money and taking away our rights are all shuffled into fantastic all-encompassing conspiracies. And If I happened to be full of money and the devil, I’d pay clowns like Alex Jones or David Icke to exaggerate my crimes and mythologize my powers. Not only do the bad guys get all the best roles in the extravagant sci-fi narratives they fashion around themselves, but they also magically discredit every legitimate concern that gets sucked up into their conspiracy narrative. Call it disinfortainment.

I say this while hoping not to attribute any more power or pedigree to the postmodern carnival provided by David Icke or Alex Jones. They’re more like parasites than movers or shakers in all this insanity. And when they talk about corporate bias in mainstream news and our government relieving us of rights and choices we once enjoyed, it’s got to be seductive to people who are half-aware of what’s going on. And if it’s already in your makeup to believe in miracles and people rising from the dead, then how much of a stretch is it to imagine Dick Cheney (or Barack Obama) as a blood sucking reptile, or to obsess over what Republicans really do in the woods around the bonfires of Bohemian Grove.

And none of these samples of American sickness on shortwave radio are in and of themselves worthy of any great significance. But it’s all symptomatic of something strange going on. In a country founded in the Age Of Enlightenment by thoughtful and brave men who wanted to improve on the European models of government for the greater good of our people, there’s always been a counter-story. To get the United States off the ground, we relied on enslaved Africans for many decades. And then the mindset that helped people accept and embrace that kind of inhumanity didn’t go away. It evolved into an ugly legacy of lingering bigotry and hatred. And it’s easy to qualify the bizarre fundamentalism and the mindless racism as artifacts of the American South, but all this irrationality is much more widespread than that. (I’m resisting the urge to quote Pogo.)

While the Republican Party is in more serious disarray than ever, the big brutish media operation that brought them to power seems to be set on automatic, creating at least enough havoc to justify its cost. And lots of nameless unreasoning is indeed sweeping the nation. And when Icke sticks to the script he used on the air with Jones, that our lower "reptilian" mind is being manipulated by the man, he’s stumbling onto some truth there.

As far as shortwave radio these days, I guess the tables have tuned. Once a tool that brought us the rest of the world is fast becoming more relevant as a way to tune inward, into the lower brain of our very republic. And plenty of people get in touch with their creator that way. And even Tim McVeighfound inspiration and guidance through listening to his shortwave.

It was kind of hard to be in a bad mood that Wednesday morning. At least for many of us. Barack Obama had won the big election. Fair and square. It almost felt like optimism. Then I wondered about all those right wing propagandists who have taken over the AM dial across America… What the hell would they have to say on a day like the fifth of November?

This led to an online scavenger hunt for conservative talk radio from that fateful day. And I found plenty. It was like putting buckets out in a heavy thunderstorm. When it was all over I had captured close to a hundred hours of right wing radio broadcasting from November 5, 2008 (as MP3 files). I’ve gone on archiving binges like this before. And typically what I do is sample some of what I collected (just to get a flavor of the stuff) and then store it away in a digital attic for historical purposes. And you never know. Archival collections like this can come in handy for some future project.

Then I got to thinking… Hey I have a radio blog. And gosh, the future is now!. And wouldn’t it be so much fun to post a bunch of clips of all these deflated propagandists having a bad day. Just to make it simple, I came up with a plan. I’d post the opening monologue of each show. Nothing more. What would come out of their mouths on day one of this new reality? Of course, this meant that I would have to listen to each one and write a litter teaser/synopsis to lure you into listening. Right? I mean I guess that’s what I do here. It didn’t seem like an insurmountable task.

Anyway, the only problem was that I had to really listen. I wasn’t going to put up vile propaganda without providing some context. Then again, perhaps I hadn’t thought the process through very carefully. And in a sense, I was defeated by the very material I had assumed I would enjoy (in a schadenfreude fashion).

Okay, I wasn’t defeated (It didn’t turn me into a Republican or anything). But ingesting hours of right wing radio propaganda is probably not a very good idea (unless your a dittohead or a masochist). In fact, there was something rather toxic in the strange amalgam of boredom, nausea and repulsion that swept over me in all that listening. I began to feel like I was trapped in a Room 101 of my own creation.

As it happened, the great media buffoon, Glenn Beck, just brought this whole blogging experience to a halt for me. It was just the final straw after listening to awful radio for days. I became increasingly averse to putting myself through one more minute of Beck’s thoughts. After all, I did have other things to do. And for a while I did them, intending to eventually finish this post… soon.

Of course, this is why Media Matters for America was founded. For a long time, the smears, lies and distortions aired on right-wing talk radio were barely noted and rarely challenged– because unless you subscribe to the consensus reality of the media right (Fox News, Murdoch papers, talk radio, etc.), you will find getting immersed in it for any length of time to be an unnerving and uncomfortable experience. Now we have intelligent and thoughtful people to monitor these broadcasts for outrageous and false content. But just like the people who take care of your trash at the curb (or what you flush down the toilet), they need to be paid. It’s thankless work.

The truth is I spent way too much time attempting to get a grip on the slippery Mr. Beck. I’d listen to the same few minutes repeatedly trying to ascertain his point, or viewpoint, or something. But each time my brain would naturally tune out. I’m human. I have limits. In retrospect, it felt rather like getting trapped on a barstool next to a loud mouth drunk. Which kinda makes sense. Not only is Glenn Beck a recovering alcoholic, but a key element of his persona is flaunting that fact.

Just recently I came across a news story where Beck admitted that during his last spree of championship drinking (the late 1990’s) he had become quite an asshole. Now if you ask me, I doubt Glenn Beck has changed all that much. Except he’s apparently quit drinking. Which I guess is a good thing, but it all kind of reminds me of a certain president we used to know.

Then it all started to make sense. For me, lending an ear to a meandering egoist like Glenn Beck is a constant struggle against a visceral urge, not just to ignore him, but to physically move away from the radio (or just shut off it off). Then again, I guess some people are really inspired by Glenn Beck. His radio show has proven to be quite popular. And he’s traded in his gig as a right-wing CNN gadfly for a shiny sideshow booth over at Fox News. (Check out Steven Colbert’s humorous parody of Beck’s new show here.) Although I must admit that I am heartened to hear that Glenn. Beck (and other conservative media types) aren’t giving up on Sarah Palin anytime soon. (There’s a balloon to pin your hopes on.)

And how grandiose Beck sounds, making the Obama election a national "self-help" event and invoking the founding fathers. Beck is the master of cocky half-wit profundity. And all discussions on Becks’ show seem to lead back to his throbbing self-importance and sense of drama.

If you’re not familiar with Glenn Beck’s radio antics or the huge rightist talk radio industry in general, I can’t blame you. If I hadn’t developed a taste for talk radio a long time ago, I would never wallow into that mess either. But if you’re wondering what it’s all about, the machinations of right-wing talk radio are pretty simple. It’s a massive and effective propaganda machine that masquerades as informative entertainment. It’s become a massive media movement employed by the moneyed interests of the US and their corporate associates to convince people of lesser means to happily support laws and lawmakers who favor the privileged and the upper class (and to habitually vote against their own economic interests). While Rush Limbaugh kind of invented this method of political warfare on a national scale, in the last twenty years it’s proven to be a very effective method for electing Republicans for local and national office. Of course, over this last election cycle rightist talk radio just didn’t provide the kind of political support it generated in previous years. Which in a sense, led me to put together this post.

While there’s always been political opinion in talk radio, since the Fairness Doctrine was scrapped at the end of the Reagan Administration, there’s been something else– Political radio warfare. It has gotten so bad after Bush took over, that there was a grassroots movement to develop a left-wing talk industry to counter the many-headed media monster the right had developed (which I talked about here).

And since there’s so many varieties of independent and moderate Americans, there’s all sorts of right-wing talk hosts (each with their own approach and style) working day and night to make them angry and blind– to inspire people who should know better to hate Democrats and fight the "evils" of liberal policy and progressive politicians. After some consideration, I’ve decided against offering all of the thirty-five propagandists I’ve archived. Instead, what you’ll find here is a reasonable and representative sampler of conservative bile and blather collected during the first full day of "President-Elect Obama."

And one thing to keep in mind that the far-right propaganda performers hate political moderates. That’s why they didn’t really have their heart in supporting McCain. While they loved Sarah, they suspected old John might not be the far-right ideologue he portrayed himself to be during the campaign. And remember Bill Clinton? Very moderate. Almost a Republican. The talk radio mob really hated him. Pounded on him daily. They still do.

So, let’s take the temperature of the golden goose of the 1994 Republican revolution at the dawn of a new era, and see if he’s cooked yet.

The top dog of right wing talk, Rush Limbaugh set the tone for the genre over twenty years ago. And although there’s all sorts of shapes and sizes of rightist talk these days, the basic mold created by Limbaugh has proven effective– putting forward a host who is provocative, haughty and unwavering– in your face. Provide an over-confident rightist asshole with a microphone, and don’t apologize for the indignities that arise from the all the entertainment that ensues.

With so much joy and relief sweeping around the world after Obama’s win, it was only natural that the news industry would start seeking out the disgruntled right-wing pundits who didn’t get their way. Just to keep everything fair and balanced. And you would think that with McCain getting thrashed in the polls for weeks that Limbaugh would be better prepared for what was bound to be the most scrutinized intro monologue since his drug addictions became public knowledge.

It would appear that Limbaugh didn’t put much thought into this big moment. The material he brings to the table is scattershot at best. He starts out congratulating Obama for defeating Hillary Clinton (which of course happened months ago), and then he gets lost in an extended train wreck of football metaphors. (With only a high school education, football is where Limbaugh usually goes for analogies and comparisons in most of his oratory).

Toward the end of this clip you ll hear Limbaugh somehow re-imagine that the crowd at Grant Park on election night started to turn on Obama when he mentioned they might have to sacrifice and work harder to bring a better world. Notice the cute way Limbaugh embodies "black thought" by ending each exclamation with the familiar black to black slang noun "bro." (as in "That wasn’t the deal here bro!" ) This is a constant Limbaugh theme, to create fictitious scenarios where where blacks openly lack the ambition and initiative of white folks.

Considering the bad news, Rush comes off as rather carefree and chipper on November 5th. As a somewhat moderate Republican, John McCain has been a topic of derision on Limbaugh’s program for years, and his approach here is that there wasn’t a real conservative in the race anyway, so no big deal. "This wasn’t any big landslide," Limbaugh mocks the portly Limbaugh. “And how many of those votes were stolen?”

Yeah, right. No hard feelings I guess, eh? It sounds to me that Limbaugh is the one who’s going to have to work harder to make things happen over the next four years. It’s bad enough when your job is to publically denigrate and mock an inspirational figure who has so many important qualitites you lack (like class, intelligence and grace), but it’s gotta be even worse when the inspirational figure is black and you obviously have a big problem with that fact. Barack Obama makes life a little harder for Rush Limbaugh. He forces him to edit himself.

When the big man gets to talking, now and then something rather racist falls out of his mouth. Whether he’s telling black callers to take the bone out of their nose or contending that all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson. Another dumbass comment he made about a black quarterback cost Limbaugh his coveted gig on ESPN a few years ago.

Angry and white radio rightists like Limbaugh and Michael the Savage Weiner energize racist factions within their core audience by saying racially insensitive stuff that doesn’t quite go over the line. And it seems that Obama and his media operation is more than aware of Limbaugh’s vulnerabilities, and the way he magically repels moderates, women, Latinos and younger people away from the Republican party. Maybe you noticed how the administration has been teasing and taunting the opiated blowhard into more public foolishness than usual. And Limbaugh’s swollen ego makes it impossible for him to avoid taking the bait.

While getting pushed into the top arc of the news cycle has to be driving up his listenership in the short term, it also makes Limbaugh much more vulnerable. When he says something fatally stupid, or some new Limbaugh scandal breaks, it’s going to happen right square in the public spotlight. Of course, when Humpty Rush takes his fall there is a prince in waiting…

Like Rush, Sean is rather sloppy out of the gate on day one of the new era. And I just have to wonder if all these righty talkers just never considered the most likely scenario would really come true. And then a shocker– Hannity theorizes that "the left" has been fighting dirty, spending years orchestrating a failure of President Bush just for their own political benefit! (I tend to think that the thousands of lives that might have been saved was a little more of an incentive, but okay) I guess that means that all of Bush’s failures have been caused by those evil genius liberals. Who knew?

Compared to the portentous Mr. Limbaugh, Hannity is able to at least feign some measure of momentary grace in defeat. Only to note that the Obama win wasn’t quite the election landslides of Hannity’s heroes– Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. You see, Hannity walked a fine line that Wednesday, trying not to sound too much like a bitter partisan hack while never missing a chance to demean or denounce Obama. Yet, although Hannity is pretty repulsive, there are more vile and ridiculous voices on the radio.

It would be easy to write off Michael Savage as a hateful xenophobic little prick, but he’s really so much more. If you listen carefully, what you’ll hear is a really boring self-absorbed old fart, who seems to drop in something outrageous, vicious or crazy every once in a while– just to make sure you’re still paying attention. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve heard a man on the radio who seems to need so much attention (Remember, Randi Rhodes is actually a woman…).

Not surprisingly, Savage has no allegiance toward McCain or the Republicans. Actually, there’s not quite enough hatred toward gays and brown people in either major political party for Michael Savage. He says in this clip that he spits in McCain’s face. Nice. However, most of what you’ll actually hear is a just pathetic homely man who needs listeners so bad. It’s odd. A couple of people I actually respect actually find Savage’s act entertaining (or at least compelling). It just reminds me of early onset dementia.

Okay, O’Reilly isn’t really so much demented as depraved. But that’s beside the point. Mr. O’Reilly imagines himself a bigger and better version of the average American, and a righteous media advocate for religious and fact-deprived Americans. And when he tries to explain complex and profound issues and current events on the radio or TV there’s something poetic in his inarticulate and ignorant analysis and insight that might either help you understand why the U.S. has been the laughing stock of the world or make you feel even more enlightened by your own lack of knowledge and curiosity.

With a relatively successful TV show underway, I ve always wondered why O’Reilly wanted a daily radio show too. Perhaps just because Sean had one. And any hotshot talk host has a staff at hand, some hosts are more involved in the process in their own preparation than others. But here, O’Reilly sounds like he might have rolled into the studio fifteen minutes before air time with a hot coffee and a roll of Tums.

In fact, not long after the election O’Reilly announced that he was getting out of radio. Perhaps the looming election kept old Bill at the microphone another year or so, but not long after this broadcast he called it quits. Supposedly this will give Bill more time to make his TV show even better. How exciting.

Okay, I’ve had enough of the highly paid hacks and hucksters. Bring on the freak show! Ladies and gentlemen, the mostly highly decorative officer in Phoenix, Arizona history. (Or maybe she said “decorated”…)

For me, full-bore kookiness is a lot more fun than hardcore RNC talk radio. Officer Jack has retired from the force, and today he conducts his conspiratorial talk radio program from America’s survivalist playground, the high Rocky Mountains of Idaho, USA. Like many fringe and freaky rightist radio shows, McLamb’s daily program is carried by the Genesis Communications Network. Many of their shows can be found on a few little AM stations scattered across the countryside (mostly in the south and out west). But the main outlet for McLamb’s (and most GCN content) is WWCR (World Wide Christian Radio), the shortwave multi-frequency international powerhouse in Tennessee (andon the web).

A retired cop (who can’t seem to give up the uniform), McLamb also founded an organization called "Police Against the New World Order," which should give you an idea where he’s coming from. And Jack doesn’t like Obama much. But the far right wackies never liked Bush much either. I don’t think the conspiracy fetishists ever like any elected president, or any leader for that matter. Government is always the enemy, run by monsters in cahoots with the infamous elites and the secret societies. “Well, you see who the international criminal elite chose to be our President,” McLamb tells us. “We now have an Obama-nation as President of the United States.”

McLamb is concerned that this election may bring on the great American “race war” that so many survivalist/patriot extremists have been predicting for so long. And how might that happen?. According to McLamb, the satanic international criminal elites don’t like brown people, and they might have Obama killed, and then blame all the white supremacists. Thus starting a “race war.” All of which might make you wonder if McLamb might be a bit of a bigot himself.

And maybe his is, but doesn’t want you to think so. In fact, this monologue kicks off with one of the more extravagant “some of my best friends are black” expositions I’ve heard in quite a long time. To hear McLamb tell it, he has a real passion for people “of color.” The problem with Obama however, is that he’s a communist. And MAYBE a Muslim. And McLamb hates Communists (He might not like Muslims much either.) And on the day after the election there’s just something very creepy about getting on the radio and talking about Obama getting shot in the head.

And then the more you hear McLamb ramble, the more you begin to see how the conspiracy paranoia and religious mental illness all dovetails into a colorful worldview that’s very popular on U.S. shortwave radio (and in the dark corners and back roads of the internet). It’s a general fear of the “new world order,” which often translates to worries about elites in general, the pro-Satan forces, and space aliens. And then there’s the concerns about immigrants (at least they exist). As you might imagine, there’s more than a little bit of racial hatred at the heart of all this conspiracy thought as well, but the true nature of the bigotry is often masked or coded into the public presentations of all the kooks and preachers spreading their messages of fear and intolerance. Actually, if you take away the religious apocalypticism and the science fiction, and it’s really not that all that different than the worldview of Limbaugh or Michael Savage.

In closing, Jack brings up what has become the lynchpin topic for most of the Obama hating paranoids on the air and on the web. Out of all the rumors and smears spread during the campaign, the meme that Obama is not a natural born citizen is the one that continues to fire up the hoards of fringe fraidy-cats out there. Despite substantial proof debunking the rumor, the idea that Obama is some foreign agent (or just not quite American enough) is very appealing to people who already feel ill at ease about Obama’s skin color, or that he has Muslim relatives.

Perhaps we can take McLamb at his word and assume he really does “love people of color.” I guess that would make Obama one of McLamb’s “black brothers and sisters.” It’s the people who employ Obama (and Bush as well) who concern him– the international criminal elite. And of course, you know what Jesus called them: “The Anti-Christ Communist Synagogue of Satan.” (Hmmm.)

So, let me wind up with post with another talk host on the outskirts of radio. This one’s kooky, but not quite a kook. And while I don’t think he’s a racist, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the first to say he’s either. And back in the 1980’s, he seemed to be on the verge of hitting the big time.

It’s David Paul, a guy who used to have one of the sleaziest overnight talk shows in radio history on WSB in Atlanta (which could be heard probably a couple dozen states on their 50,000 watt signal) during the 1980’s and 90’s. It was called “Off The Wall with David Paul,” and that’s just what it was. It was stupid and entertaining and often irritating, and it was hard not to listen when you came across Paul’s oily voice and goofy persona in the middle of the night. His show was his own blend of soft-core shock jock fare, with lots of slutty girls calling in keeping David interested in the proceedings and keeping a lot of dirty old men up all night long.

I’ve intended to write about David Paul in more detail for a little while now, so I won’t say so much here. But the short story is after his gig at WSB ended he ended up in Florida (WIOD) I think, and maybe another station or two. And then he disappeared. Occasional internet searches to check if Paul had popped back up somewhere never panned out. Until a year or two ago, when I found out he’s doing a morning drive show at a teeny tiny little radio station down in Georgia.

I’m not totally convinced that David Paul is a right-winger. Although he may be. It’s just that Cartersville, Georgia is such a Republican zone in an already Republican state that it’s probably a good idea for his radio persona to be Republican, whether he is or not. After all, he did need a job. Who doesn’t these days?

As Paul comes on the air he has good news for his listeners. Except for Obama, just about every local and state candidate down there went for the GOP. Although Chambliss would have to call in Sarah Palin some other big Republican stars to help him finally re-secure his Senate seat in a run off election.

Did you know the Democrats want to control everything you see, hear and read? Right. For chrissake, only a hard core Republican (or a dumb ass) would believe that. I know this has been a big talking point bandied about by a lot of right-wing nutballs and crazy Christians out there, the idea that the power hungry Democrats are going to legislate the end of the dominion of right-wing talk radio. It’ll never happen. But I suppose it could be interesting if somehow the voters could became more educated on the corruption and collusion between the far-right in this country and a number of corporations that has led to the vast majority of American talk radio hosts doing shows that are both political and very right wing. It didn’t used to be that way. And America has always been home to a whole range of political beliefs, and has never been a rightist (or leftist) nation.

According to David Paul, without having a radio dial full of right-wing voices people (let’s assume he means Georgians) wouldn’t know what to think and how to vote. And he gives an impassioned reason why his listeners should fear the Democrats: “People can be led.” Exactly. People can be led. “You have a choice!,” Paul says, raising his voice. And his listeners do have a choice, probably between two or three right wing talk show hosts at a time. While progressive talk radio has a foothold in the business these days, there’s plenty of towns and counties where it’s almost impossible to find anything resembling progressive talk radio or any talk radio that isn’t obnoxiously espousing hard right Republican talking points. While Paul is kind of a hoot some days, when it comes to politics he really is a maroon.

Since Obama’s election I’ve heard many in rightist media scream like monkeys about how the Democrats are going to bring “fairness” back to talk radio (and shut down the far right wing dominance of talk radio). While I don’t believe anything quite like the “fairness doctrine” of old will return, I do believe that all the conservative talk radio hosts on the air don’t want their monopoly of talk radio to become a topic of discussion in the media, and especially in the halls of congress. It just wouldn’t be fair.

I have a hunch that right wing talk radio may take a big hit in this new post-bust era, as more and more Americans find they’ve lost their savings and/or their job (and their health insurance), the rightist media figures who have championed illegal and very expensive wars and all of the toxic corporate and financial deregulation that took our economy into this ditch. And all the while smearing unions, environmentalists, anti-war activists, and promulgating specious arguments against the minimum wage, universal health care or anything else that might benefit the middle-class, the working poor or the unemployed. And just like folks who turned over their millions to Bernie Madoff, millions of listeners turned over their common sense, compassion and cultural outlook to contrarian ideologues like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage and Beck. And one day they’ll realize they have nothing to show for it, besides a seasoned ignorance on how government policies and economic principles play out in the real world. And a lifetime supply of mega-dittos.

In four-hundred ways, we’re in uncharted territory these days. Especially when it comes to media, information and politics. And the political talk radio industry that rapidly grew during the Clinton administration, and became more diverse during the eight years of Bush and Cheney, now finds us in an era that still doesn’t have a name– where the rules keep changing and nobody knows where we’re heading. And when Obama quoted from the King James Version at his inauguration, saying– “The time has come to set aside foolish things,’ I think he was really onto something.

And so let me put aside these foolish voices, and move on. Occasional casual monitoring of conservative talk radio just to get a flavor of the RNC media machine is one thing, but sitting down and getting personally acquainted with dozens of hours of this garbage is something else all together. I’m not saying I was damaged, exactly. But from the beginning, this blog has been a labor of love. Although I occasionally do find right wing talk fascinating, I find nothing to love while I’m immersed in the dogmatic swill of it all.

There are changes afoot in the talk radio scene. To what end? I don’t know. But you wanna hear something really weird. I think it’s weird. It’s Rush Limbaugh– all spastic and sullen and bitter. It’s quite a change from the cocky pill-head strut of Clinton impressions and chuckle-packed regular features demeaning activists and thinkers and the poor. Listen to his petulant whine as he complains that those awful Democrats are “mean-spirited…heartless….horrible winners.” Is he serious? When I first heard this clip I really thought he was going to fucking cry (as some Republicansdo, at the strangest times). But he never really does.

Actually, instead of the audio, here’s the video! I’m sorry. I know it’s not easy to watch. And the man does not look healthy or happy. And one wonders what might be taking the place of his beloved painkillers. I imagine it’s hard to be Rush Limbaugh… without a little numbing now and then. And if you’re wondering why you should waste bandwidth on a chubby Republican emoting, let me tell you that the arm flapping is worth the ticket to the show.

Is that just sad, or what? And while I think right wing talk radio may be in for a world of hurt, the progressive talk radio format that organically rose to challenge the chorus of scary repug voices on the AM dial has always been a problematic commercial undertaking. It doesn’t help that many of the hosts espouse political positions quite different from the official positions of corporate interests who sponsor, syndicate and promote radio shows and radio stations. And the simplistic solutions and god and country mumbo-jumbo of the rightist talkers has a broad easy appeal that trumps any real discussion of the issues or accidently bumping into the true complexity of human affairs. Then again, maybe the Democrats are just lousy businessmen, and hard-selling a harsh reactionary political agenda on behalf of big money just makes people feel good. I sure don’t have all the answers.

While I’m not going to drag this post on any further, I should mention that there has been a lot of news in the progressive talk radio business. Let’s see if can get all I’ve heard and read lately into a few quick coda paragraphs here…

Amid lots of drama and a little mystery, liberal talk syndicator “Nova M” is gone. Their home station in Phoenix has switched back to Spanish programming. And of their two big stars, Mike Malloy is scrambling to syndicate himself without missing a week, and Randi Rhodes will probably show up back on WNJO sometime soon. And I’m sure she’s land some type of syndication deal somehow. While Malloy was live on the web last Friday night, I have no idea if he’s going to be on the air this week. And as of this writing Rhodes is still sulking in her Florida bungalow, or condo, or whatever she calls home down there.

And Air America? You gotta wonder. They finally lost their biggest star, Rachel Maddow. All that’s left is a vestigial morning hour where they broadcast the audio from her previous night’s TV show on MSNBC. And Thom Hartmann (who just cracked the top ten of Talker’s Magazine’s “Heavy Hundred” talk show hosts) has abandoned Air America as well. One time CEO Mark Green is pulling out as well, to get back into NYC politics. And in the vacuum created by Rachel pulling out of AAR’s evening lineup has come Ron Reagan, son of the oft-heralded Republican hero. And I must admit, he’s not bad.

Perhaps the most interesting thing going on over at Air America is what former hosts Sam Seder and Marc Maron are up to. They’ve created a daily web-only videocast (which is also a free audio podcast) where they can freely be ridiculous and creative and even utter dirty words now and then. It’s called “Break Room Live,” and it takes place at 3pm every weekday in a real break room at the Air America headquarters. While it’s rather unprofessional, it is produced. Actually, it’s a Brendan McDonald production, and fans of McDonald and Maron’s efforts on Morning Sedition will probably enjoy this somewhat primitive progressive news sitcom. Perhaps it’s an acquired taste, but I Iike this show. And occasionally it is hilarious.

I don’t know how long Air America is going to spend money on this offbeat experiment, but there’s worse ways to waste an hour or two sitting at your computer. Like listening to Michael Savage or Glenn Beck or Dennis Miller (oooh, that’s really bad). But I am starting to think that Rush Limbaugh may just go down in a ball of flames. And it might happen sooner than you think. Until something wonderful like that happens, I think I’ll take a vacation from conservative talk radio for a while.

Let me get back to something more whimsical and heartwarming? Like shortwave radio perhaps. And maybe I’ll see you at the SWL fest!

While I don’t really watch television, it saddens me that Beck’s sleazy radio work has advanced his presence in the media. Under fire from the Fox News ratings juggernaut, CNN (from what I’ve read) has made a number of compromises to their programming to make their content more glossy and Republican friendly. But this might be a new low.

Along with right-wing talk stars Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Beck’s program is syndicated by Clear Channel’s “Premier Radio Network.” Now based in Philadelphia, Beck is widely heard (on about 200 stations) in the U.S. Nationally, he made his biggest splash as the ringleader and keynote speaker for Clear Channel’s pro-war “Rally For America” gatherings around the country in 2003.

While Beck political spiel falls in line with the armies of right-wing talk hosts who infest the American AM dial, he’s best known in talk radio circles for routinely making outrageous and psychopathic offhand remarks and discussing world issues in a rather cheeky jingoistic manner. A reformed alcoholic, Beck is reminiscent of a barstool loudmouth with a mean streak. However, instead of just being a tavern nuisance, Glenn Beck is broadcasting to a national audience. And now the once respected cable news giant CNN has seen fit to add Beck’s sophomoric hyperbole to their prime time line-up.

Like the mannish and reckless Ann Coulter, Beck becomes another outrageous and flaky TV pundit who will say anything to pollute a debate and get a cheap laugh on behalf of the Republican party. The coarsening and dumbing-down of TV and radio political coverage has created a glut of news and information programming in moral free fall. It seems the checks and balances of U.S. media (like accountability and public outrage) are irrevocably broken. I suppose Rush Limbaugh made irresponsible and vicious right wing commentary acceptable and marketable in the name of “entertainment.” Nowadays, making offensive remarks about the unempowered, and calling for the torture and death of people you disagree with passes as hilarious satire. And I guess CNN just wants to join in on the fun.

While it might not be fair to judge Beck’s upcoming CNN program before its launch, there’s no reason to believe he’ll be any more reflective or thoughtful on TV than he’s ever been on the radio. Over the last couple years on his program Beck has called Cindy Sheehan a “tragedy pimp,” and said the victims of Hurricane Katrina are "scumbags." And apparently it only took him a year to start really hating some of the families of 9-11 victims. Chances are the same kind of chuckle-nuggets will flow from his television show too.

Talk host Lionel has a somewhat similar history to Glenn Beck, having also launched to fame from WFLA-AM in Tampa, and spending some time on cable TV as well as being one of Premiere/Clear Channel’s crew of talk hosts for a while. But while he can be as flip and silly as Beck, Lionel ultimately respects the power of "the word" and the responsibility of being a national radio voice. Instead of using easy insults or crafting an emotional attack, Lionel sticks to the facts and makes his argument with logic and compassion for all concerned when the topics are serious. On Tuesday night Lionel weighed in on the announcement of Beck’s new TV show, and I thought you might like to hear it. Just for fun, here’s a couple of clips of Lionel discussing CNN’s decision, and the wonders of Glenn Beck in general.

A personality like Glenn Beck is representative of the pornification of media. Rather than edify or really entertain, Beck stimulates. He stirs up the bloodlust and mook-hormones of his fans, and angers the hell out of some people who think or care or stand against violence. But unlike Limbaugh, O’Reilly or Hannity, Beck doesn’t come off a chiding chirping Republican talkbot. He has a disarming "ordinary joe" grin on his face as he advocates death, despair and torture. The rise of Glenn Beck is just another victory in the neo-conservative media campaign to get common folks to vote against their own interests and morals. Perhaps his detached goofiness is even more dangerous than the growing media pantry of more strident neo-con voices.

This post features a few highlights from a few listening sessions from the second weekend in October of last year. I was holed up in an efficiency cottage south of Albany, and it was the last time I really had a few days to scan the bands. As I said before, when I get out of the city is when I try to listen to radio in a more meaningful fashion. For one, there’s more time without the interruptions and diversions of being home. But more importantly there’s less radio noise in lower population density areas which makes picking up distant stations more likely.

I’ve made a couple trips upstate since October, but each time I’ve stayed at a chain motel that seems to be impervious to radio waves. I assume under the concrete the damn thing was a steel building. I have actually featured radio I heard on those trips in this blog series, but if you must know the truth I recorded those listening sessions in a car sitting in the motel parking lot.

I know, I AM a geek. I kept envisioning a cop rolling up and wondering what I’m doing with a slightly exotic radio and a tape recorder out in a parking lot on a winter night. Probably receiving instructions from Al Qaeda…

Anyway, I didn’t really tune into anything especially amazing or unprecedented on that trip. Listening/recording sessions in years past have been more fruitful (and I hope to go through some of those tapes for future posts). But that weekend the noise level wasn’t so bad, and the dial was full of voices. And I heard some interesting and disgusting radio, a little bit of which I will share with you here.

Recently a reader left a comment that he had been given a shortwave for Christmas, and was “kind of disappointed,” remarking that even late at night most of what he was able to pick up was “Christian stuff or Spanish language stations.” And that kind of thing can be a real problem for somebody who is curious about shortwave radio and tries listening to it for the first time.

For one thing, a majority of what you’ll hear moving across the dial (besides static from gadgets and wiring) is either not in English, or is some Christian garbage you wish was in an unfamiliar language. That’s because shortwave in America is mostly Christian propaganda, AND most of the rest of the world uses shortwave for information and entertainment, and most of the world’s listeners aren’t native English speakers.

Let’s face it, if you know another langauge, or several of them, you’re at real advantage listening to shortwave. But If you’re a pathetic unilingual American like myself, you’re probably going to search out broadcasts in English. Although now and then I stop twisting the turing knob for a bit when I hear some Asian, Latin or African music I like. When the music’s good, I’m not so concerned that I don’t know what hell they’re talking about. And while some of the major languages aren’t so hard to identify (or at least I think I have a good idea of the region of origin). Here in New York, you hear a lot of languages and a lot of accents. But sometimes when I’m listening to shortwave I’ll stop at and listen and realize I don’t have A CLUE of what language it is or where it might be spoken. The BBC itself broadcasts in over thirty languages.

But the other thing about shortwave is that LATE at night is not necessarily the best time to DX shortwave, or listen to English Broadcasts. AM can be great for DXing late at night, but shortwave is better in the early evening for a number of reasons. Generally, that’s when a lot of international broadcasters “beam” their English broadcasts toward North America. By then it’s getting dark in Europe and Africa, and it’s when they assume people would be home and listening– from the dinner hour to the “prime-time” television part of the evening. While not as many countries spend time and money catering to American audiences as in the past (They know most Americans DON’T listen), there are still a number of (typically state-run) stations around the world who do broadcast in English for a few minutes to a few hours everyday. And most aren’t going to go all the effort and have the show run here in the middle of the night.

If you’re new to shortwave radio, or are thinking about messing around with one, the best thing to do is to spend some time on the internet doing some research. Read the experiences of other listeners, read reviews of the radios, and possible check out some stations that stream their programing. Not only that, but you might want to check out a number of sites that feature lists of English broadcasts from around the world. You probably won’t be able to receive most of them, but you’ll have an idea when and where to look on the dial.

Or you can just scan the dial, like I often do. While a digital reciever is good for finding specific frequencies, it’s much easier to find busy sections of the bands with by wheeling through with an analog tuner. Many digital radios do have automated scanning, but don’t depend on that dig out far away signals, and they stop on RF noise just as much in the city.

So, here’s a few clips from that weekend in October. I was listening with one of my favorite radios, my Panasonic RF-2200. It’s from the late 70’s and it’s one of the best analog portables around. They regularly go for $200 or more on ebay. There’s a lot of ‘em out there, and it’s a workhorse that has amazing AM reception and great shortwave reception too.

Here’s a few clips that I found kind of sad. Sometimes a listening session ends up being more of an overview of what’s going on in the world, rather than a fishing trip you’ll brag about. And during this weekend, there were two disasters– an earthquake in Pakistan, and horrific mudslides in Guatamala. And it was just over a month since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. As Ken had mentioned in a recent post, if you throw in the Indian Ocean Tsunami from the end of the 2004, there was just a horror of natural disasters around the world within one year. And when things are bad around the world, the shortwave radio is still an important source for news, and perspectives on the news from countries and cultures around the world.

And speaking of disasters, shortwave is also a good way to hear a lot of good old fashioned American ignorance. Like in this first clip.

This is a fairly new show on WBCQ, one of the few stations (I think there’s one other one) that ISN’T a Christian outfit. However, they have to pay the bills one way or another. While there’s some cool programs on WBCQ, sadly there’s also been plenty of ignorance, hate and stupidity broadcast from their Maine transmitter over the last few years. Sometimes American shortwave is like the worst open-mic night on Earth.

I didn’t make out the name of the host of “Creation Nation,” but it doesn’t seem that important. But you have to wonder what inspires this character do a whole show about how much he and the good lord really hate homos. And what is that accent? Philly? Sounds to me like a guy who might have made a wreck of his life and then "found" Jesus. Or maybe he’s just an extremely closeted self-hating kind of person. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Creation Nation” is where “intelligent minds meets intelligent design.” And how does that happen? Well, it’s simple. He tells you “what immorality is like, and how not to follow it.” In fact everything he says is simple. He’s a simple man. And hey if this guys nasal recitation of passages from Leviticus does inspire any homosexuals to turn away from their abominable misdirected lifestyle, all they have to do is say out loud: “Jesus I’m a sinner.. Forgive me, make me new again,” and crap like that and POOF that queer desire is gone forever. Christianity is SO easy.

And then, in a compassionate moment he asks his listeners to pray for the non-listeners, you know, the whole world. But he wants us to especially pray for the hurricane victims and the “old people who are going to freeze this winter” because they can’t afford heating oil. He doesn’t mention if the prayers will warm them up any, but maybe a few more will get into heaven or something.

And remember, this station is heard around the world. It’s SO sad that there are the types of Americans who’s words reach thousands of miles beyond our borders. Why? Well, time on WBCQ is quite affordable (cheap!) from what I’ve heard. Hey, if YOU want to put together some worldwide radio yourself, call up Allan Weiner! What the hell. Think about it. You could even make money. Change the world! The possibilities are endless. (I have no financial interest in WBCQ)

The reception here is a little noisy, but it’s the best I could get at the time. There was a bit of antenna adjusting going on.

After Katrina, 18 Louisiana stations, and one shortwave station in South Carolina formed a temporary network to serve the region during a time of trouble and inform the region and the world what was going on after the disaster. (Based at WWL the big news/talk station in New Orleans, The United Broadcasters Of New Orleans ceased to exist November 4.) It was a unique response to a crisis, and highlights what real radio (as compared to satellite services and internet streaming) can still do better than any other form of broadcasting– provide real service to a region of the world.

I heard quite a bit of that weekend over shortwave, and here’s one segment of that. A lot of what I heard was talk hosts fielding calls from hurricane victims with questions about what to do, and callers telling their stories of personal loss. For example, a woman in this clip complains about how she doesn’t know what to do with the 2 cars, an SUV and a boat that washed up in her yard.

And there’s plenty of disaster public service announcments warning people about the dangers of mold and poisonous flood waters, and information about how they can be reunited with their house pets.

The hosts are in good cheer here for the most part, and their New Orleans accents are authentic and somehow reassuring. While New Orleans culture and spirit won’t be killed by all this, the city is crippled for many years and will NEVER be the same.

Af the very end I turn to an adjacent Catholic broadcast talking about some Catholic energy bubbling over at an Louisiana evacuation center after Katrina. Amen.

How I dislike Mr. Beck. I almost don’t even want to write about the guy because I don’t want to think about him that much.

Smarmy. That’s the best word I can think of. Smug, glib, and just in general somebody who thinks he’s far more intelligent than he really is. Not that he’s not good at what he does, up to a point. I just find him consistantly repulsive, and not a deep thinker. Thankfully, no stations in the NYC market carry his spew lately.

Glenn Beck is a national host these days, but ironically he launched his syndication gig after a tenure at WFLA in Tampa where he had replaced a much more thoughtful guy, Bob Lassiter.

This is creepy radio. Apparently, Beck had asked on the air for somebody who tortures for a living to call in and talk about it. I believe this clip starts pretty early in a call from “Mitch” (which he eventually says is a pseudonym) who claims to be an “intelligence officer” who has tortured people on behalf of the U.S. government for three decades.

Is he for real? I’m not sure. Could be an act, or worse. Might be telling the truth. But the matter of fact manner in which he discusses blowing out eardrums with a high pressure hose and drilling on live teeth is enough to make you depressed, if not ill. Whether it’s a put-on or not, "Mitch" is a convincing immoral asshole. A perfect fit for the Glenn Beck program.

Obviously titillated by the gruesome topic at hand, Beck tries not to giggle too much while making jokes and lobbing softball questions at Mitch to assist him in justifying his theoretically sickening career. Beck says he was put off by the miscreant behavior of U.S. soldiers and contractors at Abu Gharib. Not that all the torture was so bad, but he was offended by all that “kid stuff.” (Perhaps those pyramids of naked prisoners reminded him of his high school days or something.) According to Beck, if we’re going submit people to cruel and unusual punishment, we should get “pros” to do it. You don’t want some amateur blasting out eardrums incorrectly. Somebody might get hurt.

By the way, this was a Saturday late night re-broadcast of a Friday morning show (which was discussed on this page at Media Matters For America) broadcast on WPHT-AM in Philadelphia. Late at night there are actually very few right-wing shows on the air. Which is a relief. (And the world IS a better place since whiney and miserable Steve Malzberg lost his overnight gig on WABC.) However, a few stations replay daytime Republican propaganda talk shows overnight– because they’re too damn cheap to hire a real person to fill that slot.

That’s all for now. And hey, think about putting on your own shortwave radio show. The world needs you!